Moneyball is a raincloud, and A’s bloggers are Eeyore. The book follows you where ever you go. It’s difficult to come up with an interesting angle on the A’s that hasn’t been covered by Moneyball, or by the seven hundred billion gazillion essays about Moneyball that followed Moneyball. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can manage to scrounge up a few sticks, lean them up against each other like a tent, and crawl under. It’s better than nothing, but you still get wet.
Even more annoying than Moneyball and essays about Moneyball, are discussions about essays about Moneyball. There exists a sort of Moneyball corollary to Godwin’s Law. Whenever there’s an online discussion about the A’s, someone will inevitably bring up Moneyball. Which is fine, until someone else inevitably feels compelled to say, “They missed the whole point of the book!” Nothing follows from that point but the beating of dead horses.
Of course, by discussing this, I have now written an essay about discussions about essays about Moneyball. And when you enter your comments below…
In other words, Moneyball has become cliché. There’s nothing left to add to it, except to start making jokes. As Mark Liberman at Language Log wrote about my Eskimo-word-for-slump joke, “stereotyped rhetoric repeats itself, first as cliché, then as irony.”
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